Submitted by: Katie Marcus(46) Log in to become a member of Katie Marcus's Fan Club!
A simple marketing design is one that grabs your potential customers' attention and clearly delivers your message to them. Your presentation makes all the difference as to whether people will notice your marketing material, understand your message and take action.
A well-designed ad outperforms one that hasn't had any thought or much effort put into it. Something that was just "thrown together" will look "thrown together."
On average, a person will spend about five seconds looking at an ad. A brochure on the other hand, has the potential to take up much more of your potential customers' time because of the interactivity – just opening and folding the brochure is interactive. In either of these or other print marketing materials, you need a simple design with simple copy to match. You can use these commercial printing media to connect with potential customers and build a relationship with them.
To help you connect, here are four tips to clear, simple design:
1. Clearly state your message. Don't let it get lost in all the copy or colors of your ad. Be sure to use fonts and colors that grab people's attention and then make sure those words tell them what you want them to know. If you have multiple messages, you need to prioritize them. You need one main message that stands out above the rest, in the boldest color or in the biggest font.
2. Design for your goal. Use your goal for your marketing piece to define how to design it. Is your goal to get customers to visit your Web site to learn more about you or order a product? To get potential customers to your Web site, you could create a flyer with a picture of your well-designed home page with a call to action.
The call to action is simple: "Visit our Web site to learn more." If you want to tout what they can learn on your Web site, use bullet points to help them visually break down all your text. You don't need to put all the information on your Web site on the flyer, just a few points to entice them to visit your site.
3. Use a pattern design. Eyes are drawn to patterns. People feel good when they look at patterns. Patterns help people to retain information, so if you can present your information in a neat, clean pattern, by all means do so. You could make a pattern out of words, such as text that is shaped like a pyramid, with the words being the jagged edges.
You could also have a large checkerboard pattern of four squares, with copy in two squares and photos in the other squares. Make sure that one of these photos is brighter or somehow stands out from the other. Do not.
4. Make sure it is readable. Special effects such as jagged font, or using all capital letters might look cool to you, but if it's hard to read, no one's going to take the time to try to read it. Don't be gimmicky. Use a serif font (fonts with "feet," or extenders) and a sans serif font if you're going to mix fonts.
Katie Marcus writes about the commercial color printing
industry and the latest printing technologies to benefit marketing
campaigns of businesses.
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